Research databases provide a wealth of technical and scientific information for researchers (i.e., commercial, academic, etc.). Research databases provide online libraries of documents related to medicine, government, etc., complete with searchable citations, bibliographies, etc., associated with those documents. Users can search the research databases by entering search criteria. From the results produced by a search, the user can download those documents of interest.
Some research databases are accessible to any user, while other research databases require a subscription to access. The terms of the subscriptions vary and set by content providers. Subscriptions are purchased (either on individual level or as a package covering multiple users) by users. Generally, for any type of subscription (i.e., individual or group), each user can download copyrighted materials to own computer, and keep them there for a period of time. But after copyrighted material is downloaded, multiple users cannot use the copyrighted material even if those users are a part of the same subscription group. The copyrighted materials cannot be allocated to an infrastructure where users can access the copyrighted materials, instead of going to the original source of copyrighted materials.